Self-Center: Thoughts on the Self-Esteem Phenomenon

-- James Patrick Holding --
(Tekton Apologetics Ministries)

The impetus for this essay was a book that a reader asked us to check out, titled Christ Esteem by Don Matzat. The book is out of print, and so not reviewable here, but as I read it (and to answer the reader's question, as a whole, I find it quite useful) I find something surprising. Matzat takes us on a Biblical journey in which he refutes the modern desire for "self-esteem" and replaces it with "Christ esteem." What is surprising is how much of what Matzat recommends, corresponds to essentially this advice: Become less like a modern Westerner, and more like an ancient person of the sort that lived in Bible times.

The irony of course is that Matzat, for all his erudition, likely is unaware of the work of the Context Group or other contextual scholars who highlight the vast differences between ancient and modern personality. Not that this is to his discredit, especially since he wrote some years ago (1990) when little of this information was readily available. But we would like to note some of his comments, and in turn indicate how these correspond with the markers of ancient personality, courtesy of Malina and Neyrey's Portraits of Paul. What we will find is that our modern "problems" lie much in our personal psychology (as we noted as well where discipling was concerned).

Matzat observes that as little as 40 years ago, one never heard the self-identity question so common today: "Who am I?" "How can I develop a positive self-identity?" Matzat replies [28]:

The personal identity of the apostle Paul was completely immersed in the person of Jesus Christ...Should not such glorious identity and victorious life meet the needs of this generation?

Compare Matzat's determination of Paul -- correct in essence, if written in modern terms -- to what is offered by Malina and Neyrey about the concept of "embeddedness" [158]:

...[A]ncient Mediterranean people identified and defined themselves as situated and embedded in various other persons with whom they formed a unity of sorts...the individual person... [Read More]

1 Corth 14:29-36, a closer look.

What is the view of women in the Bible? This seems to be a question that people throughout history and in our modern time want to answer. Was Jesus and Paul really anti women or is there more to it than the ‘plain reading’ of the text? There has been a movement in the past few years to answer these questions; such popular works like Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code try to answer these questions. One example of this is can be found here:

“The Priory believes that Constantine and his male successors successfully converted the world from matriarchal paganism to patriarchal Christianity by waging a campaign of propaganda that demonized the sacred feminine, obliterating the goddess from modern religion forever.” (1)

Of course, there were a few religions that did have female dieties (such as the Isis cult), but is there really any evidence that there was full blow 'matriarchal paganism'? No, because after all... groups such as the Mirthia cult were far from 'matriarchal' as well as most of the religions o f that time. So did Christianity really erase these beliefs? No ; however; some of these questions are not answered as easy this, so what I’d like to do is go into one common verse to discover, is Christianity really anti-women or are we just not getting the message that it is telling us? I’m going to go into just one common verse from Paul that is commonly used just to show that Paul (often cited as being the worst of them all) is about as women hating as sugar is sour:

“As in all the congregations of the saints, women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the Law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church.” (2)

What I like to look at first is the various views on this verse and tries to develop which one these views would accurately reflect what Paul was teaching really teaching. One commentary {Matthew Henry’s} even goes as far as to say: “Enjoins silence on their women in public assemblies, and to such a degree that they must not ask questions for their own information in the church, but ask their husbands at home.”(3) This does seem to support the idea that Paul was indeed telling women to sit down, shut up, and be obedient, but the question is, is this right way to view... [Read More]